Ms Rory Chen1, Dr Vibeke Catts1, Mr Juan Carlo San Jose1, Dr Darren Lipnicki1, Professor Sarah D. Bauermeister2, Professor Perminder Sachdev1
1UNSW, UNSW Sydney, Australia, 2University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
Dementias Platform Australia (DPAU) was established to accelerate the progress in dementia research by supporting researchers’ access to international population ageing studies. We developed the CRS (Contributing Research Studies) Explorer, an interactive data visualisation tool to make data more discoverable and accessible, using the open-source R-Shiny.
The CRS Explorer is featured on the DPAU Data Portal where authentication is required for security. To accommodate the heterogeneous datatypes across CRS, Dementias Platform UK (DPUK) C-Surv Ontology was adopted to map CRS data onto 18 level-1 categories. Moreover, 35 common variables such as sex and age, which are widely used in neurodegenerative and bio-epidemiological research, were harmonised across CRS.
The Explorer Summary Table provides an overview of data availability for CRS. The CRS Explorer features both CRS filters and Participant filters. CRS filters include metadata and data availability for the C-Surv Ontology categories. Participant filters include the 35 common harmonised variables. Researchers can adjust the filters to identify the data of interest and download reports for use in their Data Access Application. The Visualisation tab presents individual distributions of the 35 variables based on the filtered results, and allows researchers to explore relationships between selected variables with bivariate graphs. All graphs are produced using R-Plotly for interaction.
The CRS Explorer provides a highly interactive user experience and enables detailed exploration across CRS, and offers significant reduced administrative load for research applicants. The CRS Explorer provides a scalable, cost-effective, and secure data exploration tool for DPAU.
Biography:
Rory is the manager of Dementias Platform Australia (DPAU) based at Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA), UNSW Sydney. Rory is responsible for the setup of DPAU, management of the DPAU websites, liaison with contributing research studies and project applicants, coordinating the data application and review process, and DPAU project management. She will also lead the DPAU data management, standardization, curation and harmonization.
Rory is a data scientist, with an MSc in Statistics from UNSW and a BSc in Statistics from Beijing Normal University. She previously worked at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC) and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on various clinical trials and observational studies.